SmokeSound

Debbie Riddle is a sweetheart, but fickle.  She apparently gave her country away, but now she wants it back.  "The citizens are sick and tired of political correctness. They want to take their country back."  Who does she want to take it back from? The Apaches?  The Kiowa?  The Comanches, Caddos, Karankawas, Coahuiltecos and Carrizos? Maybe she wants to take our country back from the Tawakonis and Kitsais.  Or the Bidais? Maybe the Jumanos or the Wichitas.  I think Debbie Riddle already did that, a long time ago.  Did you know the name "Texas" comes from the Caddoan Indian word, "Taysha"?  It means "friend".  "Taysha" was was corrupted to "Texas".  It no longer means "friend". Now it means, "We want our country back!" I suppose our Riddle, Debbie, might mean that she wants our country back from . . . oh, I dunno . . . Mexicans. But that is a bit of a puzzle, too.  Maybe Debbie forgot ...

. The Mall of America is so large that it is being imagined into separate regions:  youth here, food courts there and here, games over on that side, and now, real money on the south side. Ceramic tile instead of carpet.  Huge chandeliers.  The remodeling has begun, quietly.  Two guys were talking: ". . . like the Crave restaurant.  High end." "You mean like high end panties?" "Yeah.  That sort of thing." Where, I wondered to myself, is a runty little guy like me-- low end and all--going to find underwear?  .

Harley is a continuity, a song that we recall. The transitions in his life are not crossroads chosen.  Harley's life maintains, a path continued easy on. It is the wind that shifts and the songs that change. Harley measures the wind against his jacket, rhythm-walking songs like a story changing shape. He does not stop, and start again, as if to find a way. Harley maintains, having been, and going easy on to another song, coming on the wind. Harley shapes his life with easy strokes, seeing in the wood what waited there for him, working large strokes and letting detail come from what we wish or had almost lost until the song came back upon the easy wind. The colors in Harley's life are gentle light, filtered through long stories and old songs. The dawn is old, and sunset new, and night is gentler still, with echoes on the wind.  Harley is a quiet song, a gentle wind, an echo when we listen, still; a continuity.

This is what a train is:  it is a brute engine, pulling steel-wheeled railroad cars, coupled together, over ribboned-miles of steel track. A train is a freight machine, and sometimes a shuttle for passengers, brutal, efficient, noisy, romantic, and old-fashioned.  In the night, when birds are hunched into the trees, the train is a clickety-clack on the wind, and a deep harmonic songs up through the trees. That is what a train is, except when it is not that; when it is a silver ghost, held close above the earth by something that electrons do, a minute and five miles from where it just has come and gone.  We should not be wrong to say that trains make steam of wood and coal and water boiled, hauling lumber east and people west and cattle up from Texas. But trains are diesel, too, and monorailed, and levitation magic. Marriage, we like to say, is a union between one man and one woman, a honest way to make babies and grow old, a Norman Rockwell pi...

I try to avoid talking about politics and religion.  I hate to get hurt. I avoid religion by sidestepping deftly:  changing the subject. I ask, instead, how they feel about buggering little altar boys, or by suggesting we talk about what came before God; things such as the Big Bang creation of something from nothing, or maybe just commenting what a shame it is gay people cannot get married.  Politics is more difficult.  Everybody hates politics and politicians. Everybody wants to throw the lying scoundrels out of office. That's why they love Sarah Palin and making money and talking dumb.  She knew that all politicians were simpletons, so she quit. She was smart.  She gets a lot of money from the people who say politicians are so stupid they should just quit.  Or, if they won't quit, they should all be thrown out of office in the next election. What a lovely idea! Throw all the incumbents out! Every one of them!  That shoul...

Distrust of government is shared even by those who want us to elect them to public office.  Consider, for instance, U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, who spends millions of dollars every two years to be re-elected to Congress, where she charges that the government is being occupied by a gang of thugs. The howls of the Tea Baggers that government is the enemy is nothing new.  They are part of a long tradition of mindless opposition to necessary public services.  They chant, "Taxation without representation!" when their representatives propose to tax them.  They say they are being taxed to death by Barack Obama when he has lowered the taxes on almost everyone.  They hate taxes, but complain that the poorest members of our society do not pay taxes, and are freeloading.  Even Ron Paul, our Resident Libertarian in Republican clothing, suggests that health care should not be mandatory, not should emergency services be provided to people who...

As the host of Kitchen Stadium says, "If memory serves me right . . .", Friedrich Nietzsche said something like this:  "I should not build a house, but were I to do so, I should build it right into the sea.  I should like to have some secrets in common with that beautiful monster." I woke today, my head filled with building such a house, thinking it to have huge stones to create a foundation two meters thick, anchored to something like granite-- none of that sand- or limestone--with oak and iron shutters to protect the seaward windows, and that even so, were that beautiful monster to heave itself, thirty feet tall, against such stone, that the house might not stand. It has not been my fortune, or fate, to build such a house, but I know why my head was filled with such dreams: I spent yesterday at our log house, cutting old wainscoting to make door, window, and baseboard trim for our outhouse. I am not protesting too much, or at all! I read Niet...

It is no accident that Our Belle, Michele (Bachmann) and Sister Sarah Palin deliberately and repeatedly use gunfire language:  armed, loaded, reloaded, gunning for, taking aim at, people who love God and guns and revolt.  At the same time they use the language of revolt and revolution:  the loss of our liberties, the takeover of our government by fascists, communists, socialists, and godless atheists.  They speak of un-Americans, and admit that they have never personally seen Barack Obama's birth certificate although, personally, you know, they are not really saying that he was born in Kenya, and smuggled into Hawaii in a banana crate when he was eleven hours old, but they think it would be a good idea for him to prove that he is not a Muslim.  Or Black.  Or that he did not vote for himself in the last election.  Maybe admit he stole the Presidency by getting a lot of people to vote for him.  They are crazy.  Worse, they are playing with in...

For several years, we have systematically been transferring wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest people in America.  We are still doing so.  Financial institutions are not designed to enable ordinary people to manage their money, to give them loans, and to help them buy houses.  They are ways for the wealthy to make shitloads of money; to pay themselves like princes. The greed almost brought, not only our whole economy down, but that of the entire global economic system.  As a result, relatively poor people are poorer still; out of work, out of unemployment insurance, and out on the streets. What we used to call the upper middle class, or just the middle class, is becoming afraid that they, too, are in danger of freefall. Some of those people are Tea Party members.  Lots of them. Poll after poll is showing that Tea Party people are a little better off than most Americans, a little better educated, and scared and angry.  They are ...

In the winter, when the weather is bad, and when it is still dark, early in the morning, I walk at the Mall of America, just as the night construction and maintenance crews are finishing work, and long before shoppers and sales people show up.  The MOA is a huge rectangular building, with several floors, three of which go all around the building.  Each circuit is more than half a mile in length.  Just for fun, this morning I took pictures, in response to a request that I show where I walk when, as today, the weather was nasty enough to make a wimp of me. 

One of our neighbors is moving after about fifty years.  Another neighbor-- another "founder" of this good corner of Eagan-- hosted a gathering to send them off to a one-story house about ten miles away. I met the Gotts for the first time. He is the guy who rides around on a motor scooter with a Samoyed dog sitting in front of him.  He has a sign by his driveway that says, "Gott's Acre". I am smooth, so I asked him why he called it a cemetery. "It's German, you know," he said. "It means "God".  I said I knew:  "God's field.  A cemetery." God Gott said, "Huh?" I am not only smooth.  I am erudite. I taught him all about Søren Kierkegaard, whose name also means cemetery. That conversation, and a little exchange with another neighbor who did not mind living next to a cemetery, but who had severe reservations about people with brown skin led to a discussion about who was really dumb a...

What we really need is a health care bill for old barns.  Instead of paying farmers for not farming, we should pay them to preserve the grand, old gothic-arched barns.  Instead, they go over to the other side of the barnyard, and put up poles, and a steel building.  County regulations will not let them burn the old barn, so they look the other way.   It is not so much blame, as economics.  Time passes.  It is, too soon, too late.  The world will not end with a bang.  It will reclaim.   

Years ago, Mari and I planted daffodil bulbs in the grass, next to where we park, at our log house.  We had no intent of coddling the little critters.  If they wanted light, they would have to push up through the grass for it.  They did.  Now, every spring, they come up first, look around for deer and rabbits, and turn toward the sun.  There is something lovely about coming down the grassy road, to discover that something beautiful has happened, whether we worried about it, or not.  Later in the Spring, when the blossoms have gone, I will mow the grass, remembering that down there, daffodils are napping, again, and will rise early in the Spring, and listen for the gate to open.

The John Birch Society was founded by Robert W. Welch, Jr., in 1958, and was named after--that's right!--John Birch who, among other things, was a Baptist missionary in World War II.  I was twenty-seven, too green and naive to know that the John Birch Society was not, in its essence, something new in America.  In those early years of the John Birch Society, those of us who were working for social justice, discourged by the Korean War, frightened still by the anti-communist raging of Joseph McCarthy, and threatened by the John Birch Society, which saw conspiracies and communists and un-Americans everywhere, were being attacked by a swarms of killer bees.  Conspiracy theorists are with us always.  Paranoids are with us always.  They swarm when things are tough, when times are troublesome, when we do not understand what is going on.   What is going on today is that we have barely avoided another Great Depression.  Under the political ...

The kitchen light did not turn on. Damn!  Have all the fluorescent tubes burned out? I bought four new tubes.  Wrong size:  too fat. Four skinny tubes did not work, either.  There was current there. It had to be the ballast;  a mysterious device designed to massage the electrical supply to the light. That worked!  It was like replacing an electical octopus. I did have to fuss with the main breaker panel, of course, trying to find the right circuit breaker.  A circuit breaker is like a light switch, up wind, controlling--for instance--electrical supply to a room, or some larger, limited section of the wiring system.  Circuit breakers and light switches are on/off devices.  If there is an in-between on a light switch, something is wrong. On/Off.  That explained why the alarm clock was blinking when we went to bed:  I had tried a couple of the wrong breakers. A breaker or a light switch does not just slow ...

I have walked around Lake Nokomis, in early mornings, far enough to cross the continent.  Rather then listen to an ear plug, I listen to myself; often naming things along the way.  The Counsel Benches Dirty Double Delta Dawn     Resurrection Tree The "Lord Jesus Saves Green Stamps" tree stump is gone, but the Scribe has moved on to a nearby bench.                  The Pump at the Point Willow Gate Eagle Perch (Pigeon Holed)  The Homeless Bench (Once a transcient's bed)                            The Splendid Bench Extreme Logging After the Lake Nokomis Tsunami The Lake Nokomis Yacht Club The Fleet                  Evolution Devolution The...

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church does not get it! The members of the Church get it:  only 27% of American Catholics have confidence in the way the Pope is handling the worldwide sexual abuse of children by priests, nuns, and seminarians. Popes have their own personal preachers.  The Reverend, Dense, and Tone-Deaf Raniero Cantalamessa is the current holder of the title, "Preacher of the Papal Household".  On Good Friday he said in his sermon that criticizing the Church for the sexual abuse of children was equivalent to the persecution of the Jews under the Holocaust. He did not say that sexually abusing children was somehow like killing Jews.  He said that criticizing the Church for the abuse of children was somehow like killing Jews! There are at least two obvious reasons why the hierarchy does not understand; why they are as dense as stones.  First, the Catholic Church is a male-dominated hierarchy with delusions of infallibility....

. "There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous."    --Neil Gaiman  (That is a quote from Wordsmith.org) It might be that we defend whatever we do by appealing to authority.  Sometimes we assume the authority ourselves, and say we wanted to do it, or felt like it, or couldn't help it.  Sometimes we blame it--that is, place the authority--on our family, or on our heritage, or our church.  When we want to play our trump card, we cite God as our authority.  Want to top that? Ethics become absolute only when we cite an absolute authority:  for religious people, that's God.  For most of us, we bumble along, explaining what we are appealing to:  our helplessness, human decency, long c...